Filed under About, UE by rick | 0 comments
But at least it’s unique. Well, probably unique, according to some quick Googling.
Speaking of which, my title uniqueness search turned up somebody else’s comments on Apple’s Find File functionality — its author pines for the BeOS search interface of old, where search result windows were exactly like folder windows and could be saved as folder-like desktop icons. Actually, Apple was doing exactly that well before the BeBox hit the streets… it was just part of the Copland project that never saw the light of day (and unfortunately, one of the few Copland innovations that hasn’t surfaced elsewhere at Apple since that project was killed).
Anyhow, I’m still open to title suggestions. 
Filed under About by rick | 0 comments
Okay, someone pointed out today that I haven’t updated this weblog in a while. Heck, I didn’t know anyone was reading it! Anyhow, dearest apologies to my readers… there’ll be another meaty update soon. (And a vegan update, too, I guess.)
Actually, I discovered not long after my last update that there’s more than one other weblog with this title, of no relation whatsoever. So I’ve been spending much of these past two weeks trying to think of a new name for mine. Inspiration hasn’t yet struck, though… I’m open to suggestions.
Filed under About by rick | 0 comments
Just in case you’ve found this blog without knowing anything about me (in which case, why are you reading?), I should probably drop a bit of background information for you. Seems like a good way to formally start a blog…
So, um, yeah…
Hi, I’m Rick. For the past four years or so, I’ve had the privilege of being able to take a small role in the evolution of the Macintosh world. For most of the last three years, that role has been as a user experience specialist at The Omni Group.
What’s a “user experience specialist”? It’s the best summary I can come up with for all the things I do here: basically I’ve been involved with just about everything that’s not the meat of our products (or the tofu of our products, considering some of the folks around here) but which is integral to the overall impression a user or customer gets of our work. Mostly I’m involved with human interface design and implementation… figuring out how to best handle this or that feature in usability terms and how to make to look cool, and then pushing the pixels and writing some of the code. (Yes, I’m an engineer. But I pretty much stay away from HTML rendering, automatic diagram layout, and XML outline processing.) I’ve also worked on documentation (print and online), marketing communications, installation and disk images, CD mastering, and pretty much every other facet of where the software meets the user.
Why? The success of the Mac is that its developers “sweat the small stuff”. Apple does their best when they leverage the fact that they, as Jobs says, “make he whole widget”. It’s more than just building the hardware and the software, it’s that they — and other successful Mac developers — take the time to make sure every part of the user experience is simple and positive, starting the minute you open the box. That gestalt experience is what turns contacts into customers and customers into fans.
But it’s a difficult process, with many pitfalls. That’s why I’ve started this weblog — hopefully, sharing some of what I’ve learned will be helpful to others, and the world will be a better place for it. Or I’ll spark some useful debate, and the world will at least be a more interesting place.
Filed under About by rick | 0 comments
I’ve never been much for these “blogs”… I’ve no interest in reading other people’s diaries, and have always thought keeping one is rather silly. I never got the point of “journaling” in my high school English classes… found it a waste of time, really. And especially the name the world has settled on for this whole thing… “blog” has got to be the dumbest-sounding word ever added to the English language.
So why have I joined the crowd? Well, in the course of my work as “user experience engineer and jack of all trades” at Omni, I keep writing stuff to my co-workers and in various forums (mostly MacNN’s) that maybe other people want to read. Or that maybe I hope other people will read. More on this in future entries…
And one great thing about this “blogging” phenomenon is that it’s lead to the creation of several systems for quick web publishing. Right now I’m using PHPosxom, a pretty bare-bones blogging tool. It’s based on Blosxom, which is slightly less bare-bones but requires more webserver configuration than I felt like doing at the moment. (Customizing a Mac OS X Server apache installation is often more trouble than it’s worth.) I like the *osxom tools because they let me use my own server (without needing somebody else’s along the way) and they’re quick to set up and start using. Maybe I’ll move to something more sophisticated later…
